Polarization

.

I'm coming late into the discussion of civil discourse.

This election season, following the trend of the last several years, there is a great deal of frustration against the Republicans at every level, on the part of the Democrats.  There is viciousness, and complete bafflement.  (A recent interview of a specialist of some sort asked the question: what are the differences in the ways of thinking of Democrats and Republicans, and what can Democrats do to be more persuasive?  There are major differences in thinking patterns, and I'll try to find the website and report on it.)

But it is important to remember that, no matter what the outcome of this or any elections, there is no future for the Democrats without the Republicans.  Tempting though it is to avoid our Republican friends like the plague, and to ponder vicious things we could be telling them, but which we won't, it is a terrible idea.

When I look out over the political landscape when I'm not involved in a particular political event or plan, I see fear and desperation under the bravado of the Republican rhetoric.  Quite apart from the determination to win this particular election, the rank-and-file Republicans are fearful that the Democrats are going to do something so horribly radical that it will change the face of America and make it an alien place.

How sincere this fear is among the Republican leadership is open to question.  It could simply be a ploy to mobilize the troops.  But some of the simpler-minded senators and GOP bigwigs (and there are thousands of them, make no mistake) are honestly fearful.

Part of it is a successful campaign by the Health Insurance Lobby, to persuade the entire party, and certainly its leadership, that nationalized health care will be the thin end of the wedge.  They visualize good-for-nothing unemployed, all healthy and breeding like flies, lolling on their front stoops, drinking mint juleps, while the faithful GOP is required to work for them, and pay outrageous taxes to keep these no-goodniks in gravy.

For upwardly mobile ambitious self-made millionaire wannbes, money is no use unless it sets them apart from the poor.  That is a cynical reason for putting the brakes on social reforms which, after all, enables the poor to keep a standard of living that their poverty will not otherwise allow.  This is all made worse by the widening gap between the haves and have-nots which the haves have enjoyed in the last several decades as never before.

But the fact remains that we can only go forward with these peculiar people who call themselves conservatives.  We may have to unilaterally extend our own personal olive branches, but in our minds, I think, those olive branches must be permanently extended, even if we're baffled by their thought-patterns.  They are deceived by their own people, and they misunderstand liberal intentions, but in the last analysis, we need their help and cooperation, and it will be impossible to live with a panic-stricken bunch of Republicans on the loose.

It is not just twisted logic that makes the GOP chant that They Built It, meaning their own little businesses, when Barack Obama says They Did Not Build It, meaning the infrastructure that made the businesses possible.  In some instances it was willful distortion.  In other instances it was a misunderstanding that was waiting to happen, because of the paranoia that is rampant in their ranks.

This is not a call for any sort of action, but just an observation, and perhaps a warning.

Arch

General Chunkiness

.

In the decade of the Seventies, people gradually became aware that exercise and diet were important for a healthy life.

Unfortunately, super-enthusiastic amateurs began to take the view that you needed a lot of dieting, and a lot of exercise.  From that time, for several decades, interest in an extremely lean body gradually evolved into interest in both lean and very muscular bodies, with many knowledgeable (and less knowledgeable) celebrities marketing their own exercise regimen via videos.  Women, especially, began to diet and exercise in such large numbers, that the women who did not go that route began to feel picked on.  (I suppose unless you oversell your point of view, you never get anywhere in this world.  It has ever been thus.)

Psychologists got into the act, and it came to pass that to remark on someone's weight or shape, or lack thereof, was considered anything from mildly insensitive to insulting, to positively rude.

Now the following facts are probably all acceptable as true:

(A)  You do not need to be very thin to be healthy.  In fact, being extremely thin is a health liability.

(B)  Being moderately slim is something we all want to strive for.  Some of us just don't want attention drawn to the fact that we ought to be a little thinner than we are.

(C)  There is a range of values within which a person's weight should ideally fall, based on the person's height and age and body type.  There isn't one particular ideal weight, but there certainly is a range outside which it is unhealthy.

(D)  People tend to gain weight over the years.  If you start out being chunky, you are likely to be very heavy when you hit your declining years.  See below.

(E)  Extra weight in an elderly person is a major liability.  It threatens the person's safety in numerous ways.  Heart problems, diabetes, blood pressure all become more likely with increasing weight.  (Being too thin is not good, either.)

So how shall we proceed with this discussion?  Should we respect the feelings of high-risk individuals who prefer not to address their health, and let them handle their diet/exercise issues at their leisure?  Should we respect this taboo on talking about weight under any circumstances?

Axiom D is the one I want to focus on.  Parents who defer addressing the excessive weight of their offspring ought to take note that an obese teenager will turn into an obese adult, and an obese adult will usually turn into a sick senior citizen.  Saving the feelings of an overweight offspring is a strategy with diminishing returns.  You've got to address the matter, but do it in such a way that the kid will continue talking to you.  This is tough, especially in this "Politically Correct" climate, but a parent who lives in fear of their child's moods is already in trouble.  Perhaps you need outside support to tackle the job!

One last thing: a person with tiny feet should take particular care to control their weight, or be prepared to face escalating problems with age.  A larger foot does help to handle a larger frame.

This article examines the link between
teen obesity and MS (multiple sclerosis ?)

Since I do not know any of my readers personally, you couldn't possibly take any of this personally.  At the cost of calling your ire upon me, I bring up these issues.  The younger generation is, at a superficial glance, getting to be very chunky indeed.  Health care is all well and good, but a weighty population could mean the end of any sort of health care very soon, simply because of the increased services they will need.  Even the Insurance Companies that we love so much must regard the increasing weight of their younger clients with some alarm.

"Look," you can tell your kid, "I'm not going to be around when you're sixty, so if you're overweight then, I won't be here to see it.  I could pretend it's not going to happen, and leave you alone.  But wherever you're on the weight spectrum now, you're going to be heavier when you're sixty, unless you make some changes.  I can help, or we can do it together.  I don't want to die sick and feeble, either!"

(I suppose the alternative is to die while you're in your prime, and that's not something anyone wishes for.  Think of something you can say instead!  And I hope that you mean it, if you choose to say it!)

[Afterthoughts:

My wife read this post, and remarked that we might be unusual in that we're tactful about how we talk to our children: respectful and diplomatic.  In other words, I've started to treat my child as if she were an adult friend --which she is, of course-- rather than my kid.  My wife, I realize now, has treated her children that way for a long time, which is admirable.  They're a lot younger than my child, so this is remarkable.

"Most parents tell their kids: 'You're fat!  Stop eating so much!  Get out and get some exercise!'  And that's what the psychologists were pushing to reduce."

And I realize that this was entirely reasonable, and had to happen.  (Telling a child he or she is fat is not quite the same thing as expressing concern about excessive weight.  I mean, it is, and it isn't.)  But of course, clinical psychologists understand the nuances of these things, while an overweight individual, reading about how bad it is to tell people that they're heavy, takes it to be an endorsement of being heavy.  Being heavy is not so bad, they tell themselves, because it is rude to remark on people's weight.  I'm trying to say that, yes, perhaps it is rude to make a disparaging remark about someone's weight in an isolated context.  But no, it certainly is unhealthy to be overweight.  And yes, it might not be easy to talk about weight tactfully, but if it is at all possible, it is not a terrible thing to do, especially if it can be done in such a way that it does not ruin a relationship.  What is deplorable is that the relationships of many overweight people are all conditional on no mention about weight at all.  This is not healthy.

The relationships of people who have a problem with alcohol also tend to be conditional on no disparaging about alcohol abuse.  But concerned friends find it possible to take risks sometimes, and suggest moderation, or intervention, though it is difficult.]

Michelle Obama on childhood obesity.

Bill Cosby on the subject.  Mr Cosby's ideas are a little naive, but he tends to reduce certain types of problems into the simplest possible terms, because he must believe that works with the black community, which is a primary concern for him.  He talks in terms of eliminating junk food, and improving school cafeteria menus, and so on, basically bypassing the family as the principal instrument of bringing about a healthy diet.  Is this the best thing to do?  Does it imply stereotypes about the circumstances in a typical African-American home?  Cosby is an educator, and educationists are strongly influenced by statistics.  But every individual must study the problem from his or her personal perspective.

Arch

Energy: The Paralysis of Knowledge

.

I love saying the phrase “paralysis of knowledge,” used most tellingly, it appears, by Søren Kirkegaard, to mean that when we know too much, we are made unable to act.

This sometimes happens to my very young friends, when they are persuaded that energy is the most pressing problem facing us today: if we use fossil fuels as heavily and as rapidly as the economy pressures society to do, we will on the one hand pollute our environment beyond our ability to remedy it, and on the other hand, use up our stores of fuel.

Most young people are just unable to comprehend the scale of the problems, and the quantitative parameters of the argument.  But the most intelligent of them can grasp something of the size of the problem, even without being able to understand the quantitative arguments, and it results in a sense of hopelessness.

This paralysis is further aggravated by the fact that clean energy is really not so clean.  The technology of photoelectric cells and batteries involves a lot of very dirty by-products.  (Actually, manufacturing transistors and chips involves a lot of very poisonous materials, as does the manufacture and disposal of batteries.  I know, I know.  It’s positively depressing.  I warned you.)

But there is one shining, shining application of clean energy that can be easily used, and easily implemented, and which has little or no environmental impact.  And that is passive solar heating.  If you’ve never heard of passive solar heating, this is what it is.  

You put a glass tank on your roof.  The sun heats up the water, as it is wont to do.  You use the warm water.

That’s it.  You keep your house cool, and heat your water all in one fell swoop.  Simple, yes?  BUT NOBODY DOES IT.

I think I’ll just stop here.  It’s a homework project for you readers.  There is little or no technology involved.  Why doesn’t the government make a bigger fuss about its use?  Well, there is a tax deduction.  Why isn’t it publicized more?  Because one begins to sound like a crank if one gets too enthusiastic about anything these days.

Gotta go.

Arch

Added later:

To supplement this post, I looked for information on Google, but it was so voluminous, I gave up and looked for pictures instead.

In this site, the US Dept of Energy explains how home construction can be adapted to minimize your heating needs.  Obviously, you can’t do this with an existing house very well.

In this next article, a private organization shows off an entire development that uses passive solar methods for both heating and cooling very aggressively.

This next image is of a typical solar home; this one uses both passive and active solar heating: the heating medium (the water) is moved around partly by the heat of the sun, and partly by a pump.

Unfortunately, this home seems to give weight to the stereotype that solar homes are the homes of rich folks, new and elaborate, and sitting on expensive real estate.  This is historically true; solar construction has thus far been an indulgence of affluent people who can afford to be creative with their new homes.  But with a little effort, it should be possible to turn designers and inventors in the direction of modifying existing homes to add passive solar elements as add-ons.

Thus far, I have illustrated (1) the use of sun-heated water, both for consumption, and for home heating, with equipment supplied by a commercial passive-solar systems provider, and (2) solar heating and illumination designs for new homes to use large, south-facing windows to trap (and control) solar heat, and light.  Another important principle is (3) the use of insulation to minimize heating needs over the winter months.  This last is the most practical investment for me personally; only the need to save up the funds for the improvement of our circa 1898 home prevents us from going this distance immediately.

We spend on the average $200 a month, from December through March.  If insulation cuts that expense by a fifth, we will save $40 a month, for 4 months a year, and possibly more, a savings of, on the average, $160 a year, at the very least.

A more efficient refrigerator would save us more money, if we could afford one.  Our present monster is from around 1997, and a new one would save us at least $50 a month, which means we can recoup the price of a replacement within a year.

We spend around $150 every month over the summer, for cooling.  (It is hard to tell without inspecting our bills more carefully; the electric company sort of charges us a flat rate throughout the year, and so our Summer cooling costs could be a bit lower, and our heating costs in the Winter a little higher.)  If we got into passive solar heating, it would lower the cost of the water heater, and lower the need for cooling, a savings of ... I don’t know; I'd guess at the very least $40 a month.  If I could tolerate taking a loan over two years to make the improvements, around $1800 of it could be gotten from energy savings.  I do not, however, believe that the equipment can be obtained for under $5000.  Feel free to straighten me out, if you happen to know that I am wrong!

Arch

’“”

Even the Devil May Quote the Scriptures

.
I just finished a recent post with a line from the Bible, and I got to thinking that Christians might find it offensive, even if, as I believe, I used the quote in the sense in which it was intended.  The title of this post is actually from Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice, I believe, but I could be wrong), referring to Jesus's (possibly rhetorical) dialogue with the Devil while fasting in the wilderness.

Everyone is aware that the Bible was put together by a committee in the early years of the Christian church, from writings that had come to exist many years before.  (This is frequently the case with holy books; they're assembled from existing texts, and then sanctified by the religious authority.)  Over the centuries, subsequently, the Church in Rome, and the various other churches that have sprung up, have retained a sort of loose control over the use of the Bible.  At first, ordinary people were forbidden to read it (since, presumably, they could misunderstand what they read, and interpret it in ways that conflicted with the official interpretation).  Eventually that proscription was lifted, but there still remains a general understanding that non-Christians and atheists should not be quoting the Bible, unless the quotes are used in precisely the same context as they were used in the Bible.

Of course, what Christians understand among themselves, and what people can do are entirely different things.  I wouldn't be surprised if there were Christians out there who were moderately liberal in their attitudes towards recycling thought and writing in the books that now find themselves, willy nilly, in the Bible.

This restriction on the use of the Bible —or of any holy book, for that matter— puts us in an awkward position.  The books, which of course existed long before they were sanctified for sacred use, were simply books, and contained the thinking of people who were just people, before they were canonized as deities, or saints, or prophets.  If we allow the "holy authorities" some authority to regulate the use of these books, that regulation has to be on the lines of copyright, which is commonly understood to expire after a time, when the work goes into the so-called Public Domain.  The Bible is most eminenently in the Public Domain; in fact, most churches would prefer that, since it would be extremely inconvenient to clear copyright for every use of "Scripture".

I, for one, consider Jesus of Nazareth one of the wisest and most influential men of the first century era.  Because of ecclesiastical and political reasons, many first-century records of his life and sayings have been suppressed by the Roman Catholic Church.  There is, as I have said often, a fair amount of evidence that the most useful and the most accurate accounts of Jesus's life and thinking have been carefully obliterated, because the Roman Church, and the Emperor Constantine, found them to be problematical.  (Wikilists provides a partial list of them, probably the least objectionable to the modern church, if they exist at all.  A larger list is provided here.)  It is important to acknowledge that Jesus was not the only thinker who encouraged the thinking that might is not right, poverty is not weakness, all people are family, and similar thinking that is the basis of liberal ideology today.  He was the first, great educator, and he phrased his axioms, if I may be allowed that use of the word, in terms of "god", which ultimately led to the belief in some quarters that he was literally a manifestation of god.  (Theologians have probably appropriated the word "manifestation" to mean some technical thing different from the sense in which I'm using it; a pox on theologians, anyhow, and the horses they rode in on.)  My personal belief (if the theologians allow me to use that word my way, hah) is that Jesus would say "god wants me to do such and such," to mean "I want to do such and such, though I have no rational explanation why it is in my interest to do so."  Nowadays, of course, we are a little more comfortable about making statements like the latter, because we have more sophisticated words for describing our motivations.  Jesus, of course, had to use the rhetorical tools he inherited.

The particular quotation to which I referred is, obviously paraphrased,

It is like children in the marketplace, calling to each other, saying, we sang a wedding song, but you would not dance; we sang a funeral dirge, but you would not mourn.

Jesus was addressing the fact that John the Baptist, an ascetic, spoke to the people, but they would not listen.  Jesus himself, who was not an ascetic, was not listened to either, precisely because he ate and drank freely.  The meaning of the quote (here I'm quoting Matthew, who's quoting Jesus, and Jesus is possibly quoting a common saying of those days, about children playing together, and having problems with cooperation, or maybe even a simple responsive game) is that nothing anyone does suits you.  I myself used it in the sense that we give you reasoned arguments, but you do not appreciate them.  Admittedly, I'm using the quote slightly differently from how Jesus uses it, but if the children gathered in the marketplace today and played, just as they did 2,000 years ago, and if we imagined one half of them complaining that the other half wasn't interested in dancing when they (the first half) sang, it makes complete sense.  (The sad thing is that such a brilliant line is buried in the Bible, and few —normal— people know about it.)

The Bible is full of wonderful sayings and ideas, but since the Christians have misappropriated it for their own special purposes, it has been taken out of the common literary pool from which we take our resources.  This is ironic, because for centuries, it was the pre-eminent source of quotations.  But that was when everyone had to claim to be a Christian in order not to be ostracized from society.  Nowadays, I defy society to ostracize me.  If it did, I'd just tell it to go straight to hell.  And the horse it rode in on.

Arch, feeling slightly cranky.

Petty Irritations of Election 2012

.

I don't know how it is in the rest of these great United States (of America, in contrast to other, less distinguished united states that might exist in other less exalted places), but it is very trying around here for everyone who simply wants to have a reasonable election, and then get on with life.

There is, of course, a lot of fooling around with electoral boundaries all over the country.  The party in power (but not, thankfully, in the White House) is furiously trying to make permanent changes in the system to ensure that the opposition (that's us) has a harder time trying to get back in the saddle.  Conservatives are being placed on electoral commissions.  Conservative judges are being put on the bench all over the place.  Rules are being changed in favor of big business.  And, most recently, in Pennsylvania, the procedures for identifying a voter at the polls are being tightened up.  The new requirement is that the voter must provide several forms of identification, all of which must match in terms of name and address.  State governments, of course, are notoriously careless in getting a person's name correct; for instance, the PA bureau of motor vehicles inexplicably got my name wrong in a vehicle registration.  Then, because the vehicle registration did not match my driver's license, they changed the driver's license to match the registration.  I quickly learned that it was counterproductive to call in a change over the phone; it was just asking for trouble.  So, for instance if, on election day, any of the three forms of ID have different middle initials for you, it could give an opportunity for any troublemaker at the polling booth to deny you access to voting.  There is news that the requirements are being relaxed, but there are also rumors that the authorities at each polling booth are being allowed a certain degree of flexibility to interpret the regulations.  Obviously, flexibility is only good if there is any confidence that it will be used fairly.

Over in Ohio, there was an attempt (reportedly) to roll back the hours of access at certain polling locations.  From what I can gather, some precincts in which voters had obtained longer polling hours, typically locations with disadvantaged voters, (senior citizens, blacks and minorities,) were getting their hours reduced to the standard hours.  This was being reported by Democrats as a move to cut down the hours for just those minority-area polling stations.

What the actual facts are must be checked carefully, but changing the hours of access in such a way that certain targeted polling stations have shorter hours is an entirely different matter than retracting the expanded polling hours that particular polling stations had argued for, and won.  Both situations are unfortunate, but the former case is most definitely unfair.  I have given a link to just one news source; you should check the other side of the story.  This sort of incident must be carefully inspected and publicized.

However, not only is it insidious for the direct impact it might have, it could be seen as a systematic plan to disillusion younger voters about the electoral process.  Every incident of petty unfairness drives another nail in the coffin of youthful idealism.  Let's face it: Democracy is an idealistic thing.  It is an optimistic idea, that an election can take the temperature of a people, and decide a course of action to which the entire people can subscribe.  If a strategy of turning younger people off from the democratic process succeeds, it leaves the way open for special interests and professional politicians to conduct business to their private satisfaction, without reference to the interests of their constituents.

There is also a trend, under the conservative administrations, to give more discretionary power for states, and local governments, which are rife with even more corruption and stupidity than the Federal government, at this time in history.  A large proportion of the screwy machinations that go on are from ambitious small-time operatives with absolutely no sense of any sort of larger picture.

Well, let's wait and see what the consequences of all these shenanigans are.  They could easily backfire on the GOP.  But we must avoid doing the same silly things in a couple of years; if we don't like them being done to us, I imagine the GOP will like it just as little being done to them.  There is much to be said for putting the brakes on the escalating spiral of petty cheating (and retaliation).

On an entirely unrelated subject, there is news that a Federal judge has overturned an EPA mandated requirement for coal-burning power plants to reduce their emissions by a certain amount by January 1 (of which year, I'm not certain).  The coal-burning power plant lobby was delighted with the news, and certain coal stocks rose briefly immediately following the news, while gas stocks fell (by around 3%, according to some reports).  But the coal stocks subsequently fell, and the gas stocks are said to have bounced back.

First of all, though coal is a polluting fossil fuel, and as such less attractive than natural gas for power companies, it can be made cleaner.  Power companies all over the world use dirty coal, but use more sophisticated methods for scrubbing their emissions.  American power companies --no surprise-- have refused to move towards the new technology because of cost.  They probably insist on a higher profit margin than European or Indian companies, no doubt.

Secondly, both fuels are fossil fuels, and we should not invest in them in the long term.  But the thinking in economic circles is: cheap energy makes business profitable; when business is profitable, unemployment drops; when unemployment drops, the standard of living improves.  But we will eventually run out of both gas and coal.  Nobody wants to address that fact until we actually do run out of them.  The GOP and Big Business says: forget re-tooling away from fossil fuels until the Economy is fixed.  The Economy, of course, will never be fixed to anyone's satisfaction.  It will only be declared fixed when the Dow Jones goes into the stratosphere, and taxes are at 0%.  This is all a way for living with fossil fuels as long as possible.  Why?  Because oil, gas and coal stocks are still doing very well, and gasoline-burning cars have maintained their popularity, for absolutely no reason at all except sheer testosterone, jingoism and general fatheadedness.

One thing that has gotten general acceptance is that logic and reasoning are not important for politics.  We sing, but they do not dance.

Arch

Two learning strategies for back to school.

.

My memory has never been what it used to be, and I can’t remember when I last spoke about this.

There are two main strategies for dealing with Education-style information.

The first method is to learn it thoroughly.  You’re probably thinking: now just a minute; isn’t this the whole idea of education?  But if you think about it a little more, you realize that to “learn” something is generally understood to be simply to remember the fact.  Now, wait, you say, learning is not merely remembering ... is it?  Over the decades we’ve come to believe that learning is a particularly good kind of remembering, the officially sanctioned form of remembering.  In other words, learning is (supposed to be) definitely higher up in the ranks of skills than mere memorizing.

Well, you’re going to have to deal with this cognitive dissonance yourself; as far as I’m concerned, we may as well fold the meanings of the words learning, remembering, and memorizing into one: they all have to do with mere recall.  I’m about to say that learning (with a view to remembering) is not at all a bad thing, but before I do that, I have to say some other things.

The second strategy is to find a logical reason why the fact you’re trying to assimilate is a consequence of other things you know.  In other words, if possible, you want to find a reason for the particular fact.

Everyone will agree that if all your information falls into a logical structure, you’re a lot better off than “merely remembering” the facts.  (Let me tell you, the older you get, the more likely you are to be able to use the logical structure way of figuring things out than the pure recall way.  On the other hand, I do know people who are really old who say things like: don’t ask me why; I just remember that it is true.)

Somehow, it seems, kids these days want a reason for everything.  On the face of it, this is good; it is always better to have a reason than not to have a reason.  But it is best of all to figure the reason out for yourself, rather than to be simply handed a reason on demand.  This has more to do with psychology than with learning (though current education theory seems not to have a dividing line between psychology and education, which is unfortunate).  A child that has to work to understand something is better off than a child on whom understanding is laid with no effort.

This is where things get complicated.  On one hand, it is always better to have a reason for everything, than to accept things as divine laws.  On the other hand, it is sometimes beneficial to simply learn something provisionally, with the intention of eventually finding a reason for it.  Why?  Because, very often, you end up learning a large number of similar cases; the facts (for which you still don’t know a reason) line up with an entire array of similar facts.  One day you could stumble upon a reason for one of the facts, which could immediately suggest analogous reasons for all of them.  At this point, you have figured out the reasons for all of the facts, and let me tell you, the resulting epiphany will be very powerful.

The big skill is in knowing how long to wait before you must have a reason for something.  You most certainly don’t want to wait forever, hoping for the epiphany to arrive.  On the other hand, you don’t want to get impatient and demand an explanation right away.  There is some ideal wait time, and some people have greater tolerance for accepting certain types of facts without justification than others do, and their facility to understand things, and absorb the larger picture are accordingly different.  But remembering and reasoning both have their place in your overall learning strategy.

A final word.  Learning, even if it is a matter of remembering, need not be simply memorizing at all.  For instance, if you must remember a list, there are strategies for breaking it up, or organizing it into sub-lists, which help the remembering process.  For instance, suppose you’re trying to  remember the Ten Commandments.  You could write them down briefly, and then classify them as political axioms, social rules, labor laws, etc.  This simple divide-and-conquer method works for almost anything.  The same method works for remembering the amendments to the Constitution, for instance.  If they are listed in chronological order, we should be able to group them in clusters that have some common theme.  In historical or political matters, this sort of learning is the closest one can come to having logical reasons for facts, since logic is not a large part of human behavior.

Arch

’‘“”

Elections 2012

.

With all the fussing about the Presidential elections, you'd think that nothing else was going on.  From Wikipedia I get the following information, which you use at your own risk obviously.  But you might be surprised at how much more is going on.

The US Senate: more than 30 seats are being contested across the country.  Some 20 Democrats are up for election, and 10 Republicans.  Things could change a great deal if the Democrats win a greater majority in the Senate, no matter which way the White House goes.  Of course, better minds than mine have already decided whether or not these seats are likely to change hands, and that's something I deplore about present-day politics.

The US House of Representatives: all 435 seats are up for election.  In other words, anything can happen, if you ignore prognostification about incumbents and upsets.  Of course, redistricting has upset the chances of various party favorites retaining their seats (again, according to the prognostifications), and many well-liked Democrat candidates running against each other.  (I would wish very hard for Democrats to re-district to the disadvantage of Republicans if the Democrats get the opportunity.  I think the only way out of this constant gerrymandering is to carve the country into square blocks, and return one representative per x citizens per block.  (Just forget about Montana completely.  Just kidding.)

The Capitol on a rainy day

I can't quite make sense of the Wikipedia entry; perhaps there is a summary somewhere.  But it seems to me that, if Democrats were willing to vote for Democrat candidates despite major deficits in character, charisma and intelligence among them, we could very well have at least a temporary majority in the House.  Unfortunately, of course, many of these Democrat candidates are probably Republicans in disguise, and are likely to turn into pumpkins at midnight.

The big problem Democrats have (and I hope the Republicans don't find out) is that it appears difficult to find Democrats willing to run for election.  The intelligent members of the party are too disillusioned with the electoral process and the business of politics in Washington.  The more optimistic members of the party are often not bright enough to cope with the viciousness of their Republican opponents.  Let's face it: you have to be pretty stupid to consider politics as a career.  Or you have to be a crook.

The young people in College this year are reputedly very idealistic; I hope this is true.  I hope at least some of them are also intelligent and stubborn enough to stay the course.  Obama is a fabulous example of a man who seems to be idealistic and resilient; such a fellow comes along only once in a long while.  It is disheartening to see how little visible support he gets from the rank-and-file Democrats and other liberals.  Perhaps some of this support will be more visible in this election year.

But I wish there was more interest in getting House Democrats elected.  There is very little progress with wrong-headed Republicans crowding the House.

Arch

Mitt Romney picks Paul Ryan as Running Mate

.

The faces we must
expect to see with
the GOP in the
White House

!!!  Well, I don’t see how this can play out to anyone’s advantage, except, possibly, that of Paul Ryan.  The Wisconsin electorate is certain to see the negative effects of Ryan's handling of the budget, and there seems no way that he could possibly win another term in Congress.  Being a VP will keep him from starving for a while.  How could anyone suggest that Obama is responsible for the economy, when Paul Ryan and his Congressional friends have such a stranglehold on the budget?

Clearly Paul Ryan has ambitions to run for President in the near future.  That will be fine for all those who sincerely believe that they are going to earn a lot of money as soon as the Economy "bounces back."  If you’re going to earn a lot of money, of course you can pay for your own Health Insurance, of course you can afford all the wonderful things you’ve always wanted, of course you don’t want those damn Democrats getting their hands on your money by raising taxes.  So being a fiscal conservative is a little like a religion: if you have faith in the Economy, it will bounce back, and you will make money, and to hell with the environment, poverty, aging, health care, World Peace, and the Chinese.  The only thing you will need, really, is a huge Defense budget just to make sure that people outside the US don’t get any silly ideas.

Well, the Economy answers the prayers of its believers briefly, just until some bright sparks take advantage of the loosening of controls to work a scheme that benefits a few crooks and seriously rocks the equilibrium of the Economy.  I’m not sure how the Republicans view the culprits of the Enron scandal, the Bernie Madoff scandal, the WorldCom scandal, the Abrahamov scandal, the Mortgage scandal, and the bankruptcies of Lehman Brothers and AIG.  These all seriously affect the "faith".  Usually, though, public indignation against these people is short-lived; it is the (supposedly liberal) Media that seems to be most interested in them.  So, though Republican fiscal conservatives do seem to regard the Economy as a sort of religion, it appears that they are also secret non-believers, because they appear to condone crimes against their religion with a fair degree of equanimity.

Anyone interested in analyzing the effects of the scandals of  2000-2009 decade might want to read this article on The decade's worst financial scandals.  I can’t bear to read it; it seems somewhat speculative to me.

So, as far as I can see, I don’t think the choice of Paul Ryan makes the tiniest difference to the coming elections: it is designed to appease the Tea-Partyers.  The GOP now has to make the case that a conservative Congress alone could not improve the Economy; they also needed a Conservative in the White House.  They need to wash their hands of the economic mismanagement under two terms of Republicans in the White House (after all, they will claim, there was a War On, and wars aren’t good for business, right?) one of which had a Republican majority in Congress, and another four years with Obama, and an overwhelming Republican majority in Congress.  And whenever the GOP has a large majority in Congress, they have a Plan called something like Contract With America, which promises that life will be better with fewer taxes and fewer Government services.  All it means is that the States have to hustle to avoid taking the blame for great hardship among the poor.  The implications are clear: the GOP just does not know how to deal with the poor, and wants it gone.  This is clear when you read between the lines of their Immigration policy: Everyone must get behind the demonization of illegal Mexican immigrants.  "There’s just so much to go around, and we want to keep the scraps that we have budgeted for poor people for American poor people."  This distracts from the fact that they are just that: scraps.  People must keep what they earn, and if you don’t earn much, well, that’s what you get to keep.  We knew this all along.  With the GOP, you’re on your own.  And that’s the way they like it, because they’re all going to do well in a good Economy.  That’s faith.

Afterthought:
The GOP is shamelessly focusing on not the Middle Class, but the Upper Middle Class, or, let’s face it: the Upper Class.  This is because it expects that the Democrats find it notoriously difficult to get the Working Class to come out and vote.  This is generally true, especially if the members of the Working Poor (and unemployed) can be made to believe that there will be unsurmountable difficulties in getting satisfactory ID in time for the election.
The Democrats have to get past this.   We can’t live in a world where most of us have satisfactory ID and are accustomed to producing it on demand, but where ID is inexplicably difficult for a certain sector at certain times, e.g. during elections.  I side with the GOP on this issue: let’s get ID for everyone who needs it by election time.  If the Democrat campaign workers have to work harder to help people to get registered, get ID, and get them to the polls, so be it.  In my opinion, the three objectives are not mutually exclusive; rather, they reinforce each other.
This election should be either an easy win for the Democrats, or an overwhelming victory for the Democrats.  The Working Class can be reminded that "trickle-down" economics does not work.  The Reagan-Bush Era wasn’t good for anyone unless they were working for Defense, or a screwy investment bank, or a credit card company.  But if all the campaigns work hard enough, and try to avoid getting preoccupied with Media advertising, this could be an overwhelming victory for the Democrats despite massive fundraising by the Republicans.  I reject the belief that massive fundraising is the key to election victory.  (It would be, if we subscribe to the assumption that everyone on our side--or everyone who is undecided--is a complete idiot.

[Added later:

Move On just sent me a bulletin saying that Mitt Romney has possibly just committed "political suicide" by picking Paul Ryan as his running-mate; something we can agree about.

However, they continue (Justin Ruben), Paul Ryan is young, and cute.  The implication is that cuteness can appeal to the Great Undecided when logic and track record might not.  (With an Undecided like that, who needs enemies, eh?)  So they want $200,000 to let America know that Paul Ryan is not to be trusted.

Let’s try and win this election without pouring a lot of money into the coffers of advertisers (probably Republicans, anyway).  If the same people who buy commodities like, well, American cars, for instance, because they believe TV ads are going to believe that Romney-Ryan is good for the country, well, we’re screwed anyway.  If Obama won a second term, these morons would be gnawing away at any gains in the economy or living standards because they can be persuaded by TV advertisements that despite everything "appearing" to be wonderful, they’re really suffering because the Democrats are in control, and who knows what horrible plans they have for the future?  They're probably going to make all the Chinese legal immigrants.  The GOP fear mongerers are a lot more efficient at persuading people about imaginary problems than we are at persuading people about real problems, such as poor education and decaying infrastructure.

My theory is that these morons are a small minority, pathetically dependent on the Tea Party to satisfy their "fear-craving".  If the majority of voting-age people go to the polls, there should be a huge victory for Obama, and all Democrat congressional candidates running for office.  But the problem is to get the majority of people to actually vote.]

Arch.

P.S. Here is a great clip:

Virtual Stuff

.

When you play a videogame, you’re immersed in a ‘world’; you’re looking into the screen, and it is as if you were really there.

Sort of.

Something a little different, but with some common elements, was how computing was done in the sixties: this was before individual PCs.  The idea of having a complete computer all at one’s own disposal was completely alien to our minds (since back then a computer could cost up to $100,000, and a house cost only about $20,000).  Right up until about 1960, a computer indeed was at the disposal of a single individual; you had to reserve time on the thing in advance, and then you would show up at the appointed time, use the computer for your allotted 30 minutes, and go home.

Then someone came up with an operating system that could do something amazing: it could handle up to, e.g., 10 users.  Each user would be given a fraction of a second of computer time, in strict rotation.  But the users were switched in and out so smoothly, each one felt as if the computer was giving him or her its undivided attention.  So the users were virtually in control of the ‘entire’ computer for as long as he or she wanted.  (Unless, of course, there was an 11th user who was getting impatient to get on.)

Think of what the computer had to do to accomplish this: it’s dealing with user A.  Now A’s time is up, so the computer has to (1) put all of A’s program states somewhere on the hard drive, which the computer labels “A’s stuff; do not touch,” (2) loads up B’s stuff from where it had put it before, (3) restores all B’s programs to the exact place(s) where it/they had been before, and resumes talking to B.  This is called Time-Sharing, a phrase that is used in many different contexts with different meanings, e.g. real estate.  It is a very specific instance of multi-tasking, which we’re all familiar with.

This is just a simplification; imagine the details the computer has to take care of!  But this is the genius of computer programming: you only have to think of every eventuality just once, code it in, and it’s never going to be forgotten.  Actually, you don’t have to do it all yourself; eventually someone will notice something more you could do, or something you can do better, and you put that in in your next version.

What does a user need, to feel in control of the entire computer?
* access to the operating system.  There must be a keyboard and a mouse, basically, and...
* a monitor, so that you can see what you typed, and the computer gets to talk back to you,
* a printer, in case you need hardcopy of something; and in these modern times,
* an Internet connection.
When a computer is time-sharing, all these resources are swapped in and out.  Each user gets his or her individual keyboard (and mouse) and monitor, of course, but the other resources have to be rotated.  Many of my readers are probably familiar with printer queues, which is how the printing services were rotated among several users; your print job simply waited in the queue in the order in which it was sent to the printer, and gets printed out when it gets to the top of the queue.

In certain very sophisticated video games, and so-called massively multiple-player games (mmpg), each user has a head-set consisting of video glasses and headphones, and each player has in his hand(s) a gadget or a glove, which (1) gives the user the feel of whatever he or she is holding, e.g. a light saber, or a sword, or, ugh, a machine-gun, and (2) sends the direction and control-signals of the glove into the computer, to be transmitted to the game program.  You are immersed in the game in a very intense way, because most of your senses, namely sight, sound, and touch from your hands, at least, are channeled via the computer.

Another example popped into my mind, namely flight simulators that are used to teach pilots to fly, without the liabilities of actual in-air experience.  Many video games for teenagers involve driving virtual cars in a high-speed chase through a virtual city, for instance.

One of the most interesting applications of this concept of virtuality is actually in programming.  Suppose you’re a PC person, but your wife has just bought a $10,000 super-powerful Apple ^® workstation.  All this while, she has been using your version of some software which is not available for Macs.  And she absolutely has to have it on her brand new, water-cooled, nuclear-powered Mac.

There are what are called Virtual Machines that can run on various operating systems.  In the present instance, there is an application called something like virtual PC, which emulates a PC right inside your wife’s new Mac.  It is a program that maintains the following:
(1) It uses a portion of the Mac memory, and maintains it as though it were the memory of a PC.
(2) It sets aside a modest file on the hard drive of the Mac, and manages it as though it were the hard drive of a small PC.
(3) It grabs input from the Mac keyboard, and responds to it as if it were a PC.  For instance, it can read a CD software disk, and pretend that it is a PC, and install the software, right on your Mac hard drive portion which it was pretending was a PC hard drive, and then proceeds to run it.  It can even register it on the internet.
(4) When your program wants to print, the virtual PC intercepts the printer signals, converts them into the signals that your Mac printer is accustomed to expecting, and your Mac printer prints it.

[Added later:

A few months ago, I installed a virtual Linux computer inside my PC!  Yes, I did, naughty me.  (Actually, this is one of the few instances where nobody cares that you do this.)  I could install a virtual printer--which, of course, printed off the regular printer that I had; the virtual computer interpolated between the Linux output, and the output my printer was expecting, etc, etc.

One of the most interesting things was getting on the Internet.  The imaginary Linux machine had to negotiate with the real PC which was  “hosting” it for access to the Internet.

Lastly, the virtual computer had to add the host computer as an external drive, can you believe it?  That was the only way to pass files back and forth.  The usual way is to mail the files back and forth.  Mailing takes care of the fact that file formats are different in the two systems.  (Actually, they’re the same, but the virtual operating system pretends that they’re different.  And there’s nothing we can do about dispelling this illusion that won’t screw up the emulation, other than, of course, passing files the approved way: pretending that one computer is a hard drive on the other.

When I ran out of space on the PC, I went into investigative mode, and found out that my virtual computer occupies quite a lot of space on my hard drive.  It occupied as much space as the installation CD and virtual hard drive combined, in addition to the size of the virtual machine software.
]

Obviously a lot of effort is going into running interference between the Mac input-channels: the keyboard, the mouse, etc, and the virtual PC inside the Mac, and in the opposite direction, intercepting PC output from the virtual PC, and converting them into equivalent Mac output-streams.  But this sort of thing has been fine-tuned over the years, and is very well understood.

In fact, in recent Windows operating systems, many programs run inside their own little private virtual machines.  Minimal virtual machines were implemented back by Windows Xp, resulting in allowing one program to crash, while the other programs kept going.  In the bad old days, if one program crashed--which meant that the program was finding itself having to respond to a program state that was not anticipated--the whole computer crashed.  You probably noticed this slight improvement in crash-handling, and never connected it with the idea of virtual worlds.

How efficient are these virtual machines, really?  On the one hand, a Mac providing a fake PC environment is working a little harder than a simple PC just being itself.  But a powerful Mac emulating a modest little PC could be expected to do very well.  Don’t misunderstand: PC’s can emulate Macs just about as well as the other way round.  Most of all, open-source Linux systems emulate both PCs and Macs all the time.  Virtual machines are here to stay.

Finally, many new software environments are written to run always in their own virtual machines.  This is the philosophy of the Java platform.  Java code is essentially operating-system-independent, and the Java software can be made to work on any computer, via the browsers on that computer.  Browsers, once you think about it, are a common feature of all computers, and so provide a way of interfacing with software in an operating-system-independent way.  Many other programming languages and systems are being developed to be more platform-independent.

I’m sure there’s a lot more information I ought to be giving you here, but this is a start.

Arch‘’“”

We're Getting Beat

.

Move On is mailing me, saying that "We're getting beat."

I love that little colloquialism: "getting beat", instead of getting beaten.  It either means that Move On (or at least their correspondent, Justin Reuben) wants to give a nice homey feel for those liberals who do not know their grammar, or 'beat' is what comrade Justin thinks he really is getting .

All these organizations that support the Democrats, see combating Citizens United as the most important task they have before them.  They feel that they must raise more money than the Republican troops.

Well, maybe they do.  The money is used for flooding the airways with counter-advertisements to attempt to neutralize the venom that R. Limbaugh broadcasts, and filling Television with commercials that defend Obama (and Democrat candidates), and attack Republicans.  This is imperative if, as we all suspect, most of the people on our side have short memories, are gullible, and are liable to be persuaded to vote for Mitt Romney in the Fall, or just stay home in November.  (The people on the other side are this way, but they're not in the least likely to respond to our ads, have no fear.)

Unfortunately, a very close friend of mine who works for the local Obama campaign headquarters (hem-hem, let's not mention names) discovered, to her horror, that most of those who had filled out index cards to volunteer for this or that, were not registered to vote.  It was a little alarming to find out that the campaign's biggest supporters weren't even registered.  (The people at the office immediately got on the phone and let these space cadets know the situation, and all of them undertook to get registered instanter.)

Let's do the easy things right away, and put off the harder things for after the elections.  Let's get registered.  After that, if we don't vote, we deserve what we get.

--Only if you want to!

Arch

The Republican Message

.

The few sound bites of Mitt Romney that manage to slip their way past my defenses are so laughably stupid that I can’t help wondering what sort of moron responds to them.  Jon Stewart (of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show) recently remarked on it, and I had to agree on almost every point, except that, of course, I don’t agree that a presidential candidate must disclose every little detail of how he or she will respond to every conceivable eventuality, once in office.  Romney, of course, waffles about everything, and that's the opposite extreme.  Either he’s dissembling like crazy, and will adopt a liberal agenda once in office, which would be nice for me, but wrong for those who elect him, or he’s not outlining his conservative agenda in order to win moderate “undecided” voters, of which there are a large 8% in our state, in which the incumbent (Obama, if you’re reading this in the distant future, in which case, greetings from 2012!) leads by 7%.  I know all this because my wife forgot to go to the phone bank she had promised to help out with last evening, and she was laying all this information on me in a burst of remorse.

Meanwhile, in a quite unrelated matter, an article by a political scientist in the New York Times was brought to my attention.  It asks, Is Algebra Necessary?   I saw a similar question a year ago, and gave a response to it.  Why do we teach algebra to seventh-grades, you ask?  Because it is impractical to wait until a student’s mathematical interest and talent is discovered, and then pack into a short time all the mathematics that is needed to bring this person to the point where he or she can study, say, engineering or computer science.  Teaching math is a long process, despite the claims of websites that promise instant results.  But some math-phobes refuse to concede the necessity for universal training in intermediate-level mathematics for all students, and other math-phobes are not quite intelligent enough to understand the argument.  But no matter how you look at it, mathematics will continue to be regarded by the vast majority of people as a necessary evil, like vegetables, or fiber, or broccoli, or TAXES.

[Added later: Let's talk about what we use algebra for.  What is algebra?  It is the art of symbolically manipulating abstract formulas.  If you can get away with never reasoning hypothetically, you can get away without algebra.  But planning is reasoning hypothetically.  You can only avoid hypothetical reasoning if you assume that nothing is going to change.

OK: we use mathematics, specifically algebra, in:   Economics. Computer programming.  Business models.  Design.  Air traffic control.  Banking.  Is that enough?  If a kid is destined for any of these occupations, she has to take algebra in seventh or eighth grade, well before it is obvious that that is where her future lies.  In contrast, any moron can get into Political Science, and spew indignant nonsense, and they usually do.  The category of human beings I an unashamedly prejudiced again is political scientists.  Politicians one can understand.  But it takes a special kind of person to believe that politics is a science, and I diligently stay away from them.]

When you come right down to it, Republicans of the last several decades have gotten a lot of mileage by telling the middle-class that they should not have to pay taxes, and should not have to eat vegetables.  You are too good for this drudgery, they say.  You belong to the greatest nation on earth; you should not have to pay taxes; you should not have to bankroll the health insurance of unemployed layabouts in (insert your least favorite depressed community here: Detroit, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Miami).  We’re assuming you already have perfectly good health coverage right?  Right!!!  Of course you do.  You don’t?  But do you want Obama telling you exactly what coverage you should be having, and having to pay an arm and a leg for coverage YOU DON’T NEED??  Of course you don’t!

Some of you remember that genius of deception, Ronald Reagan.  He combated Jimmy Carter’s call for growing up, and facing the consequences of runaway energy consumption by saying: Nonsense!  This is the greatest nation on Earth, and we can certainly guzzle all the gasoline we want if we jolly well please.  (“There you go again,” he said to his Democrat opponents, when they brought up any sort of realistic problem with energy or the environment.)  The message always was: You are too good to have to worry about things such as the economy, health care, poverty, education, housing.  This is a great society, and Ollie North and a few of my buddies will look after everything for you.  Just don’t vote those crazy Dems in.

And what did we get?  Twelve years of growth of government, deregulation of the banking sector, raising taxes, and a war.

You’d think people can see through this by now.  You can’t go for too long without eating your vegetables, no matter how many pills you swallow.
‘’“”